I want a small tablet with a high density display, good build quality/durability, a current OS and decent battery life. I'll use it mostly for video, music, e-books and light browsing. I had excluded apple products from my search as I'm not particularly interested in the apple ecosystem and I expected this class of tablets to be just as overpriced as the rest of their stuff, but $450 for the baseline iPad 2 actually seems kind of reasonable given the (limited) competition. The iPad fits my main criteria, however I'm concerned about the 1GB of RAM. People always say that Apple can get away with it's meagre RAM spec "because iOS uses RAM more efficiently" or some such, but what about the internet? Web pages are going to weigh the same regardless of what OS is on the machine, and the biggest difference I have noticed between my 1GB and 2GB android phones is in web browsing. I've found a lot of conflicting info on the web, with some people saying the 1GB iPads are fine as long as you're not multitasking, and others saying that with the latest iOS even the OS environment itself is clunky. I'm not going to be trying to multitask or run high performance applications, but I don't want web browsing to be uncomfortably slow.
The iPad mini 4 bumps the price up too high, to the point where I don't see it as competitive any more, and if I were to spend that much it wouldn't be an iPad. The $450-500 range is where they interest me.
So any input on the 1GB thing would be appreciated, and also let me know if you have suggestions for alternatives. I'm going to avoid writing a long rambling post about all the devices I've written off and the reasons why, but in the case of the Samsung Android tablets it was the PenTile pixels (I would love an OLED display, just not PenTile), and I'd rather not purchase discontinued Nexus devices (was anticipating a new Nexus, but all that appeared was the Pixel C, which would be out of my price range if it ever even showed up in NZ). I had also hoped for a wave of new Windows 10 tablets by now, but all I see are a bunch of old and underwhelming Win8 ones.
One other thing that irritates me about the iPad mini is that they were too cheap to put GPS in the Wifi versions. Even poverty spec Android tabs, like my HP 8 G2, all seem to have GPS. I guess I can live with my phone's GPS, but it would have been nice to have had a large screen GPS device.